Night Train to Lisbon

by Pascal Mercier

  At a kiosk a map of Lisbon was spread out, with the city churches marked. Gregorius bought one. Prado – Father Bartolomeu had said – had known all the churches and everything about them. He had been shown round some of them by the priest. You would have to rip them out! he had said, when they had gone past the confessional. Such a humiliation!

  The door and window frames of O’Kelly’s pharmacy were dark green and gold. Over the door was a staff of Aesculapius, in the window an old-fashioned pair of scales. When Gregorius entered, several bells rang, and together they produced a soft, clanking melody. He was glad he could hide behind the many customers. And now he saw what he wouldn’t have thought possible: a pharmacist behind the counter smoking. The whole shop smelt of smoke and medicine and O’Kelly soon lit a new cigarette with the butt of the old one. Then he drank a sip of coffee from a cup on the counter. Nobody seemed surprised. In his rasping voice, he explained something to a customer or made a joke. Gregorius had the impression that he called them all by their first names.

  So that was Jorge, the confirmed atheist and disillusioned romantic, whom Amadeu de Prado had needed to be whole. The man whose superiority in chess had been so important for him, the superior one. The man who was the first to burst out laughing when a barking dog had ended the embarrassed silence after Prado’s heretical speech. The man who attacked his double bass so violently that the bow broke because he felt he was hopelessly untalented. And finally, the man whom Prado had stood up to when he realized he had condemned Estefânia Espinhosa to death, the woman who – if Father Bartolomeu’s assumption was correct – he had approached years later in the cemetery, and didn’t meet her eye.

  Gregorius left the pharmacy and sat down in the café across the street. He knew there was a note in Prado’s book that began with a call from Jorge. Now, out in the street and surrounded by people who were conversing or letting the spring sun shine on them with their eyes shut, when he leafed through the dictionary and began to translate, he sensed that something great and really unprecedented was happening to him: he was occupied with the written word amid voices, street noise, and coffee steam. But you, too, sometimes read the newspaper in the café, Florence had objected when he explained to her that books demanded walls that kept the noise of the world away, at best the thick, solid walls of an underground archive. Come on, newspapers, he had replied, I’m talking about books. And now, all at once, he no longer missed the walls; the Portuguese words before him merged with the Portuguese words next to him and behind him; he could imagine Prado and O’Kelly sitting at the next table and interrupted by the waiter, and that didn’t make any difference to the words.

  AS SOMBRAS DESCONCERTANTES DA MORTE. THE DISCONCERTING SHADOWS OF DEATH. ‘I woke up with a start and was afraid of death,’ said Jorge on the phone. ‘And even now I’m still in a sheer panic.’ It was shortly before three in the morning. His voice sounded different from when he spoke with customers in the pharmacy, offered me something to drink, or said: ‘It’s your move.’ You couldn’t say the voice quavered, but it was husky like a voice covering powerful feelings, controlled only with difficulty, that threaten to burst out.

  He had dreamed he was sitting on the stage at his new Steinway grand piano and didn’t know how to play. Just recently, he, the passionate rationalist, had done something bewitchingly mad: with the money left him by his brother killed in an accident, he had bought a Steinway even though he hadn’t yet played a single bar on the piano. The salesman had been amazed that he simply pointed to the shiny grand piano, without even opening the keyboard cover. Since then, the piano stood in a museum shine in his solitary flat and looked like a monumental tombstone. ‘I woke up and suddenly knew: being able to play the grand piano as it deserves – that’s no longer within the span of my life.’ He sat across from me in his dressing gown and seemed to sink deeper into the chair than usual. Embarrassed, he rubbed his eternally cold hands. ‘You must be thinking: that was clear from the start. And somehow, I naturally knew it. But you see; when I woke up, I knew it really for the first time. And now I’m so scared.’

  ‘Scared of what?’ I asked and waited until he, a master of the fearless, direct look, would look at me. ‘Of what exactly?’

  A smile strayed over Jorge’s face: Usually he’s the one who urges me to be precise and it is his analytically trained mind that counters my tendency to leave final things in hovering uncertainty.

  For a pharmacist, it couldn’t possibly be fear of pain and the agony of dying, I said, and as for the humiliating experience of physical and mental decay – well, we had often enough talked about ways and means in case the border of the bearable was crossed. So what was the object of his fear?

  ‘The grand piano – since last night, it has reminded me that there are things I can no longer do on time.’ He shut his eyes as always when he wanted to forestall a mute objection from me. ‘It’s not about unimportant little joys and fleeting pleasures as when you toss down a glass of water in dusty heat. It’s about things you want to do and experience because only they would make your own, this very special life, whole, and because without them, life remains incomplete, a torso and a mere fragment.’

  But from the moment of death on, he would no longer be there to suffer and mourn this lack of completion, I said.

  Yes, of course, said Jorge – he sounded irritated as always when he had heard something that seemed irrelevant to him – but it was about the current, living awareness that life would remain incomplete, fragmentary, and without the coherence we hope for. This knowledge, that’s what was bad – the fear of death itself.

  But the distress was not that his life now, as they spoke, didn’t yet possess this internal completion. Or was it?

  Jorge shook his head. He wasn’t speaking of regret at not yet having experienced everything that had to be part of his life, so that it would be whole. If the awareness of the current lack of completion of his own life were taken as a misfortune, everyone necessarily always had to be unhappy in his life. The awareness of openness, on the other hand, was a condition that it was living and not yet dead life. So, it had to be something different that constituted unhappiness: the knowledge that even in the future it would no longer be possible to have those rounding-off, perfecting experiences.

  But if it wasn’t true, I said, that the incompleteness in it could turn it into an unhappy moment – why shouldn’t that also be true of all those moments filled with the awareness that wholeness was no longer to be achieved? It looked as if the desired wholeness was desirable only in the future, as something you went towards and not something you arrived at. ‘I want to put it in yet other words,’ I added. ‘From which point of view is the unreachable wholeness to be lamented and a possible object of fear? If it is not the point of view of the fleeting moments for which the missing wholeness is not an evil, but rather an incentive and a sign of life?’

  Granted, said Jorge, to be able to feel the kind of fear he had woken up with, you had to take another point of view than that of the usual, forward-looking moments: to be able to recognize your missing wholeness as an evil, you had to view your life as a whole, consider it from its end, so to speak – just as you did when you thought of death.

  ‘But why should this view be a reason for panic?’ I asked. ‘As experienced, the current imperfection of your life is not an evil, that much we agreed on. It almost seems as if it is an evil only as an imperfection you will no longer experience, as one that can be perceived only from beyond the grave. For as an experiencer, you can’t, after all, rush ahead into the future in order, from an end that hasn’t yet occurred, to feel despair about a deficiency of your life, which must still creep up to that anticipated end. So your mortal fear seems to have a peculiar object: an imperfection of your life you will never be able to experience.’

  ‘I would have liked to be someone who could make the piano ring,’ said Jorge. ‘One who – let’s say – can play Bach’s Goldberg Variations on it. Estefânia – she can, she played them all
alone for me, and ever since, I have carried in me the wish to do it too. Until an hour ago, I had, it seems, lived with the vague, never examined feeling that I would still have time to learn it. Only the dream of the stage made me wake up with the certainty: my life will end without playing the Variations.’

  All right, I said, but why fear? Why not simply pain, disappointment, sadness? Or even rage? ‘One is afraid of something that’s still coming, that’s still in store; but your knowledge about the forever mute grand piano is already there, we’re talking about it in the present. This evil can last, but it can’t grow bigger so that there could be a logical fear of its growth. So, your new certainty may depress and stifle, but it is no reason for panic.’

  That was a misunderstanding, Jorge countered: the fear applied not to the new certainty, but to its object: to what was indeed only a future, but none the less already fixed, imperfection of his life, which, because of its greatness, turned certainty to fear from within.

  The wholeness of life, whose anticipated absence drives one to the sweat on the forehead – what can it be? What can it consist of when you recall how rhapsodic, variable, and capricious our life is, outside and inside? We’re not monolithic, not at all. Are we simply talking of the need to be sated with experience? Was what tormented Jorge the unattainable feeling of sitting at a shining Steinway and making Bach’s music his own, which is only possible if it rises from his hands? Or was it the need to have experienced enough things to narrate life as a whole?

  Is it ultimately a question of self-image, the determining idea one has made for oneself a long time ago of what one had to have accomplished and experienced so that it would be a life one could approve? Fear of death as fear of the unfulfilled then lay – it seems – completely in my hand, for it is I who draw the image of my own life as it was to be fulfilled. What is more obvious than the thought: Then I’ll change the image so my life might now fit it – and the fear of death ought to disappear immediately. If it sticks to me none the less, then it’s because of this: the image, even though made by me and nobody else, rises not from temperamental capriciousness and isn’t available for random change, but is anchored in me and grows out of the play of forces of my feeling and thought that I am. So, the fear of death might be described as the fear of not being able to become whom one had planned to be.

  The bright awareness of finitude that assaulted Jorge in the middle of the night and that I have to inflame in many of my patients with the words announcing the fatal diagnosis to them, disturbs us like nothing else because, often without knowing it, we live towards such wholeness and because every moment we live to the fullest draws its liveliness from the fact that it represents a piece in the puzzle of that unknown wholeness. If the certainty befalls us that it will never be achieved, this wholeness, we suddenly don’t know how to live the time that can no longer be part of a whole life. That is the reason for a strange, distressing experience of some of my doomed patients: they no longer know what to do with their time, however short it has become.

  When I went into the street after the conversation with Jorge, the sun was just rising and the few people coming towards me looked like silhouettes against the light, faceless mortals. I sat down on a window ledge at ground level and waited for the faces of the passers-by to open to me. The first one to approach was a woman with a swaying gait. Her face, I now saw, was still veiled in sleep, but it was easy to imagine it opening in the sunlight and looking hopefully and expectantly at the events of the day, the eyes full of future. An old man with a dog was the second one who passed by me. Now he stood still, lit a cigarette and let the dog off the leash so it could run over to the park. He loved the dog and his life with the dog, his features left no doubt of that. The old woman with the crocheted kerchief, who came a while later, was also attached to her life, even though it was hard for her to walk with her swollen legs. She held tight to the hand of the boy with the schoolbag, a grandson perhaps, whom – it was the first day of school – she brought to school early so he wouldn’t miss this important beginning of his new future.

  All of them would die and all were afraid of it, when they thought of it. Die some time – but not now. I tried to remember the labyrinth of questions and arguments I strayed through with Jorge half the night, and the clarity that had been close to being grasped in order to escape at the last moment. I watched the young woman stretching, the old man frolicking with the dog leash, and the hobbling grandmother stroking the child’s hair. Wasn’t it obvious, simple and clear what their horror would consist of if, at this moment, they received tidings of their impending death? I held the haggard face in the morning sun and thought: they simply want more of the stuff of their life, no matter how light or heavy, sparse or lush this life may be. They don’t want it to end, even if they can no longer miss the absent life after the end – and know that.

  I went home. How does complicated, analytical thought relate to intuitive certainty? Which of the two should we trust more?

  In the consulting room, I opened the window and looked at the pale blue sky above the roofs, the chimneys, and the laundry on the line. How would it be between Jorge and me after last night? Would we sit across from each other at chess as always, or different? What does the intimacy of death do with us?

  It was late afternoon when Jorge came out of the pharmacy and locked it. For an hour, Gregorius had been freezing and drinking one cup of coffee after another. Now he put a banknote under the cup and followed O’Kelly. When he passed by the pharmacy, he realized that a light was still burning inside. He looked through the window but the shop was empty; the antiquated cash register was covered with a dingy wrapper.

  The pharmacist turned the corner and Gregorius had to hurry to keep him in view. They walked up the Rua da Conceição, across the Baixa and further into the Alfama quarter, past three churches that rang the hour, one after another. In the Rua da Saudade, Jorge stamped out the third cigarette before he disappeared through the doorway of a house.

  Gregorius crossed the street to look up at the building. In none of the flats did a light go on. Hesitantly, he crossed back and entered the dark vestibule. It must have been there, behind the heavy wooden door, that Jorge had disappeared. It didn’t look like the door of a flat, more like the door of a bar, but there were no signs of a tavern. Gambling? Was that conceivable for Jorge, after everything he knew about him? Gregorius stood still at the door, his hands in his coat pockets. Now he knocked. Nothing. When he turned the handle, it was like this morning when he had finally dialled Natalie Rubin’s number: like a leap into emptiness.

  It was a chess club. In a low, smoky room, dimly lit, there were a dozen games going on, all between men. In a corner was a small counter with drinks. There was no heating; the men had on coats and warm jackets, some wore berets. O’Kelly had been expected, for when Gregorius saw him behind a veil of smoke, his partner was holding the pieces in his fist for him to choose. At the next table sat a lone man who kept looking at the clock and then drumming his fingers on the table.

  Gregorius flinched. The Portuguese man looked like a man in Jura with whom he had once played chess for ten hours, only to lose in the end. It had been at a tournament in Moutier, on a cold weekend in December, where it never became light and the mountains seemed to arch over the town, as in a mountain fortress. The man, a local who spoke French like a moron, had the same square face as the Portuguese man at the next table, the same stubbly haircut as if by a lawn mower, the same receding forehead, the same jug ears. Only the Portuguese man’s nose was different. And the gaze. Black, jet black under bushy brows, a gaze like a cemetery wall.

  With this look, he now examined Gregorius. Not against this man, thought Gregorius, by no means against this man. The man beckoned to him. Gregorius approached. Thus he could see O’Kelly playing at the next table. He could observe him inconspicuously. That was the price. That damned sacred friendship, he heard Adriana say. He sat down.

  ‘Novato? ’ asked the man.

  Gre
gorius didn’t know: Did that simply mean new here or did it mean beginner? He decided on the first and nodded.

  ‘Pedro,’ said the Portuguese man.

  ‘Raimundo,’ said Gregorius.

  The man played an even slower game than the man in Jura. And the slowness began at the first move, a leaden, paralysing slowness. Gregorius looked around. Nobody was playing with a clock. Clocks were out of place in this room. Everything except chessboards was out of place here. Even talk.

  Pedro laid his forearms flat on the table, leaned his chin on his hands and scanned the board. Gregorius didn’t know what bothered him more: this strained, epileptic look with the iris sliding up on a yellowish background or the manic lip-chewing that had made him mad with the man from Jura. It would be a struggle against impatience. He had lost this struggle against the man from Jura. He cursed all the coffee he had drunk.

  Now he exchanged the first look with Jorge next to him, the man who had woken up with a fear of death and had outlived Prado for thirty-one years so far.

  ‘Atenção! ’ said O’Kelly and pointed with his chin to Pedro. ‘Adversário desagradável.’ Unpleasant opponent.

  Pedro grinned without raising his head, and now he looked like a moron. ‘Justo, muito justo,’ Quite right, he murmured, and fine bubbles formed in the corners of his mouth.

  As long as it was a simple calculation of moves, Pedro wouldn’t make any mistakes, Gregorius knew that after an hour’s play. You mustn’t be deceived by the receding forehead and the epileptic look: he calculated everything thoroughly, ten times if need be, and he anticipated at least the next ten moves. The question was what happened if you made a surprising move. A move that not only seemed not to make sense but in fact didn’t. Gregorius had often put strong opponents off with that. Only with Doxiades the strategy didn’t work. ‘Nonsense,’ the Greek simply said and didn’t let go of the advantage.